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- 38
First, thank you for writing so much and helping with processing. It was so great that the seminar was available, but I was frying out over and over.Ron says: We did one test for all viruses, parasites, bacteria, funguses including molds, both those known to man and those that have never been discovered (looking at the sequence tells you that they are evolutionarily related to another virus). This test looked for particles or cells from those organisms and sequenced the DNA inside of them. In that test, we didn't find any pathogens. All we found were things that are in normal healthy people.
We did another, different, test for DNA in the blood from some specific DNA viruses (listed in that slide). There was some viral DNA in some patients but more healthy controls had the same viruses, which are common. We have not yet tested the RNA viruses, which we are planning to do. We are developing a test to do this with on a very small sample of blood (remember, we could only get blood once from these severe patients, and we have to be very careful to get as many tests from that as we can). Enteroviruses are RNA viruses.
There may be viruses that don't ever get into the blood, but they are very difficult to test for in severe patients because the procedures are invasive.
May I ask—are you edging around some of the ideas about a vagal infection? I haven't quite figured if that's at odds with some of these more recent studies. There were some very compelling ideas in that.